Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Robert Nozick

  • Newcomb’s Problem, Neuroscience and Free Will

    By Greg Hickey ___ Imagine that you have agreed to participate in a neuroscientific research experiment on predicting human behavior. You undergo a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of your brain while you watch a video. The video opens with an image of two boxes labeled A and B, and a narrator asks you…

  • Two Kinds of Diversity: Identity and Ideological

    by Robert Gressis ___ Libertarians, like Robert Nozick, care most of all about negative freedom, i.e., freedom from interference. If you have little money, but the appropriate agency protects you from force and fraud, then you have negative freedom, even if you find yourself unable to do much of what you want to do. Consequently,…

  • Texts [That] Don’t Care

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I am preparing for a course I teach and that means deciding between a number of books that I could assign. As always, the experience reminds me how much I prefer assigning texts whose meaning is either opaque or whose arguments are incomplete or even objectionable. Since I teach future teachers,…

  • Hedonism

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Civilization has…no need of nobility or heroism.  These things are symptoms of political inefficiency.  In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.  People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. —Mustapha Mond (1) 1.…